The Economist published a rather panicked editorial recently stating that the US presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton represents “the gravest risk to the free world since communism,” with “the future of the liberal world order” depending on Clinton’s success.
Well, Clinton failed and with her hopefully goes the liberal world order that has led our current civilization to the edge of a cliff. There is no bottom that anyone can see across the ravine so deep and cutting have been our civilizations mistakes. Unfortunately so bad is the damage that it is doubtful that any form of politics will bring us across safely to the other side.
Ron Paul sees the election results as a big repudiation of the liberal elite. David Stockman writes, “America’s voters fired their ruling elites last night. After 30 years of arrogant misrule and wantonly planting the seeds of economic and financial ruin throughout Flyover America, the Wall Street/Washington establishment and its mainstream media tools have been repudiated like never before in modern history.”
Best not to forget that most republicans have participated gladly in liberal dreams of world order and establishment`s aggression against massive amounts of peoples both domestic (war on drugs) and internationally in endless wars.
It has been hard to tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats until Trump yet it is unclear how much power the new president will have to effect meaningful change. There are more powerful people than presidents but let’s hope this one is strong enough to go up against them. The elections did not make the elites poorer but perhaps some of their power over humanity can be weakened by an exceptionally strong president. Hopefully President Trump will ride in the same traditional as President Andrew Jackson, who fought the banking elites of his time tooth and nail.
Glen Greenwald writes, “Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination. The prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people.”
Greenwald highlights the fact that, “Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption.”
According to the Economist, the current political landscape is one in which the old, “left versus right” divide is being superseded by a “closed versus open” debate in which anti-globalists hoist banners. Globalists and their dreamed one world liberal order of course is not democratic. Nation states have to dissolve themselves into it, which they are not about to do.
Geert Wilders of the Netherlands writes, “Many things are bothering us. There is also much to be angry about, and rightfully so. This government has destroyed our country with its austerity policies and has allowed our country to be colonized by Islam. But let's start aiming for the imaginable. Let us liberate our country.” He is expressing the sentiment of the rising right`s basic element, which is to protect the women and home society where as liberals are falling all over themselves to ban free speech—any speech that addresses the increasing violence coming from the Islamic world.
Wilders said, “And I will not keep silent about Islam either. Never, ever. Because silence is dangerous. Last July, Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel passed away. I met him a few years ago in New York. He gave the world a wise lesson: "When someone says they want to kill you, believe them." Islam says it wants to kill us. The Koran leaves no doubt about that.”
Tolerating the Intolerable

Tolerance is supposed to be the broadest definition or the basic underlying value of a liberal society. Using four letter words does not quite describe the insanity of taking tolerance to the point where you tolerate almost anything. The left is so tolerant, they’re tolerating intolerance.
Liberals can talk all they want about the importance of tolerance but when they stand by and tolerate as masses of women are sexually attacked by Muslim men we get a clear picture of their true colors. When we see their support for the lies of climate change we get a smell of their stench. We when read about their globalist plans we see them for the monsters they are—antidemocratic to the core, elite lapdogs whose ideals make them cruel.
The liberal western media and the elites that own them will not give up declaring that Trump is a disaster for the planet (for the global warming scam). “How were climate scientists, policymaker and diplomats planning to deal with a Donald Trump presidency? The truth is, they weren’t. People who have dedicated their lives to working to save the planet always preferred to focus optimistically on how they could push a President Hillary Clinton further to the left on climate policy.”
Trump’s move to the White House in just a couple of months will almost certainly bring an end to an era of lies and deceptions that exposed environmentalists as Decepticons more mental metal than hearts that were in love with both truth and science. Environmentalists have given liberals a great part of their bad name. They are partially responsible for an abandonment of science in favor of their ideas and ambitions. In their attempts to save they destroy.
The idea that liberals, in the form of international financiers and political elites, would purposely create economic disparity, social chaos and global war out of a desire for centralized power and a disturbed sense of superiority is simply too much for liberals to see about themselves this cruelty at play.
Most liberals enjoy the virtues of a liberal society, and are grateful to live in one, and think the world would in fact be a better place if liberal institutions and values were more widely — even universally — embraced.
I would have agreed many years ago to such values but when I read what is happening with the Islamic invasion of the west, and the women being raped, and societies being threatened, and the pathetic attitudes that excuses liberals come up with it makes me want to run to the right as fast as my feet can take me.
There is a collapse going on of the liberal world. “And language control is thought control. Period. The rise of modern political correctness (PC) is a great example of the cunning way in which social engineers such as the New World Order manipulators operate. Political correctness is soft censorship. It is intolerance disguised as tolerance.
As George Carlin said, it is fascism pretending to be manners. It is running amok not just in Universities but now almost everywhere in society. Just as Orwell laid out so precisely in 1984, political correctness is the Newspeak which is threatening to limit our ability to freely speak and think, by reducing the number of available words in our vocabulary.”

Conclusion

Death is coming while liberals are all over themselves playing the blame game. Liberals are right. They know they are right. They insist on being right. They get very indignant if you suggest they are wrong. The worst in liberal intelligence could be expressed, “The idiocy of allowing millions of refugees to flood the continent when their socialist paradise is already bankrupt is beyond comprehension for rational thinking people,” writes the Burning Platform.

Liberals like Clinton ignore the basic teachings of Islam, which teach men to never accept Muslim women as equals and infidel women as nothing more than potential slaves. The left is becoming increasingly lethal with its blinders to the threat of Islamic terrorism, not only of the armed violent type but also of the rapist type. The relationship between Islamic society and honor killing is just another example how Islamic culture is not compatible with the West.

“Donald in effect convinced a huge slice of the electorate that the Clintons amounted to America’s leading crime family,” said David Stockman and that is what being a true blue liberal amounts to in this age of massive deception. It is a crime, though it is a crime shared across all political and social-economic classes. Look at the betrayal of the Greek people at the hands of their leftist politicians.

Simon Black writes, “Hillary Clinton had the full and unabashed backing of the entire media establishment. And the banking establishment. And the political establishment. And countless billionaires, Hollywood celebrities, rock stars, international press, foreign leaders, and even the President of the United States. Yet all of those big guns proved to be ineffective against a citizenry that’s fed up with the status quo.”

The best part of admitting one is wrong is that one then gets to be right. We will not see much of this though because humility is not one of the strong suits of liberals and those who have thrived on the established order.

A good friend recently suggested that when the Clinton camp pointed out, as good for them, that none of the five living former Presidents support Donald Trump, it turns out to actually have been an ironic, and powerful endorsement for Trump to bring the change to the status quo that so many want to see. The country voted for change. Meanwhile, as the post-mortem of the election and what it means continues, so does the demonizing of people holding (or instantly perceived as holding) another view. On both sides.

There is an observable human tendency to clump anyone who does not support one's own passionate perspective in with the worst possible examples of the opposite passionate perspective. For example, my Vermont license plates have been a signal to some folks in New Hampshire that I must necessarily be a full supporter or even agent for what some are absolutely convinced is an organized vast liberal conspiracy to destroy the constitution. The untested assumption is that unless I am rabidly for Trump and/or rabidly against Clinton, then I am automatically seen to be a part the destruction of our nation by the current elites. This is a two way street to be sure, and an ugly one. Uber-liberals make the same kinds of arrogant assumptions about people who would not vote for Clinton. Show up with an Arizona plate in Burlington, VT and some people there will indeed automatically suspect you are a racist, misogynist hater, at least. It's as if our society is being influenced (or confused) by a very small percentage of very loud people at both ends of a giant Bell curve lobbing incendiary devices at each other. The people in the middle (98%?) are being yelled at to pick a side, neither of which allows for any nuanced perspective or real benefit of taking a look at positive elements of both persuasions. A self-justified "My way or the highway" posture is employed equally on both sides. Humility is needed.

I concede that humility is not a strong suit of most liberal leaders. But I suspect that is an across-the-board human failing, not the exclusive failing of liberals. No one is immune from from the capacity to filter out any voice that does not agree with,or dares to challenge, their own. Humility is needed, and believing "I and people like me have it and You and people like you don't" is a dangerous self-deception all of us may have to watch out for.

Anyway, I got to wondering about humility in general, and just found an article that helped put some words (for me) to the characteristics and importance of that quality in leadership, and wanted to pass it along because I think it pertains to all of us, regardless of how we voted, as we move forward as a country. http://hub.n2growth.com/humility-and-leadership/ I don't know anything about the author and what his bias may be except that he is not on staff with Huffington. Good enough for me, for now.

JR--- Excellent article, thanks for posting the link. I agree with the author's premise as I saw examples of this type of leadership throughout the company I worked for the last 37 years, as well as plenty of examples of the opposite type of leadership.

I'm not sure "humble leadership" can be taught, however, because its success or failure depends solely on the individual's character. And character, in my opinion, is impossible to change. To quote a very wise friend of mine, people don't change, they just get more of the same.

To apply this to the recent election, the person Trump is and has been for 70 years is the person he will be as president. Whether this helps or harms us remains to be seen. But he will not be anything other than what he has been his whole life. There will be no fundamental "pivot."

That's not to say he won't change his mind or his position on a particular issue. But if he does it will be in the context of his overall and existing character, not because he's had an epiphany and has genuinely become a "humble leader."

If we want a humble leader we have to find soneone who already is and in whom humility has been an inherent part of his or her character all along. We'll need to elevate someone who is humble, not someone who says he is.

To think that a person will always be what they are at any particular point in their life is absurd.

When I think of everyone I have known personally over a long period of time, a couple from childhood, some from college, some from my first days in television in Hawaii, and many I worked with for almost four decades at Boeing, every single one of them without exception has the same basic character today as they had when I first met them. The same basic attitudes, same basic values, the same basic beliefs.

This is not to say they have not changed at all. I agree that change is a constant thing. The question is what is being changed. As we learn we assimilate new things into our lives. We "change our minds" about all sorts of things. But I am convinced from personal observation that people's basic character and attributes remain the same throughout their life. The change is layered on top of that basic, permanent foundation.

I look at myself today as compared to what I was when I started working in television in the 1970s. Sure, I like to believe I've learned to think a little more before speaking or hitting "send" than I used to. (I know a lot of people who haven't.) But the impulses that prompt my reaction-- impulses that are rooted in my fundamental character-- are exactly the same today as they were then. I've learned to temper them (most of the time ) but the basic elements in my character are unchanged. I've learned to control, modify or adapt some of the things I say or do but this is just a superficial layering over the basic character that has been with me forever and always will be.

In some course I took in college I remember hearing that the average human's basic values are established by about age five. After that everything else is an "add on" to these underlying basics that remain unchanged throughout their life. I have no idea if this is totally true or not, but I have certainly observed its validity in people I have known over a long period of time.

It helps explain why adults often pursue interests (that often lead to careers) that were "triggered" by something (or several things) that happened when they were very young. I've seen this many times in the children of friends and co-workers who I've known long enough to see their kids enter adulthood.

It also helps explain the high rate of repeat offenders.

The other week I had the opportunity to spend a day with a person I last saw when she was in her early twenties. She is in her mid-sixties today. We have corresponded sporadically perhaps once or twice every two or three years but that's it.

Today she has a lot more experience under her belt, she's travelled the world, and she's done a lot of different things over the course of several careers. All this has made her a far more aware, more knowledgeable, more fascinating person than she was when we worked together. So major big changes there.

But at heart, she is exactly the same girl I worked with in the television studio all those years ago. From our conversation over the course of the day it was obvious that her basic values, her core beliefs, her basic character are the same as they were then. And in some ways even stronger than they were back then. The "more of the same" in the statement in my previous post.

Are there exceptions to this "rule?" I certainly can't say there aren't. But if there are I suspect they're few and far between.

I certainly agree with this. As a writer the use of language is an important deal to me. Yes, I know language is an ever-evolving thing and I accept and use words today that have changed meaning over time.

But that does not excuse each and every change. Right now my most hated expression is a language change that has come about solely due to feel-good political correctness.

And that is the phrase "reach out."

I don't know about the rest of you, but "reach out" is what I do when I want to pick an apple off a tree. It's a physical action.

Now I can accept, grudgingly, the use of this phrase in a sympathetic context, as when trying to express consolation to someone who is suffering in some way. It's a "nice" way of putting something, like saying "passed on" instead of "dead."

But somebody somewhere latched onto the notion of using "reach out" to describe every form of communication. Even the news people do it: "We reached out to the police department to find out why the gunman shot three people dead outside the club."

I contact people, I call them I talk to them, I shout at them, I ask them, I phone them, I e-mail them, I tweet them, I yell at them, I write them, I fax them, I Skype them, I text them.

I don't reach out to them unless I want to move them out of the way.

This kumbaya business of "reaching out" is nothing but feel-good political correctness run amok as far as I'm concerned. I can only assume it's an attempt to divorce communications from the sometimes unpleasant (aka "real") aspects communicating with others can have.

Hiding from unpleasantness doesn't make it go away. I just makes it even more unpleasant when reality rears its head. As it always does sooner or later.